Curriculum

Recently, a good friend of mine wrote a short paper about All of Us North Carolina for her graduate program. The paper was amazing, and I had to share it. I asked my friend to share a brief description of her program and why she decided to write about the film. She also, graciously, shared her entire paper which you can read here.

Salem Tsegaye

Name Salem TsegayeAge 25School Parsons The New School for DesignArea of study MA Design Studies (focusing on community engagement in participatory art and design)Class Title Participatory Community Engagement (@ MIlano The New School for Management and Urban Policy)

Although there was a strong practice-based component to this course, including a semester-long community-based project and opportunities to facilitate meaningful dialogue, it was somewhat difficult to smoothly transfer the theory into practice. Freirean pedagogy is incredibly dense and theoretical. It’s beautifully written, but I think it requires a number of fragmented reads, where you’re not taking the text in its entirety but instead digesting it in bits and pieces. It also helps to have supplementary texts to illuminate how Freirean pedagogy is utilized in real-world dialogic practice, and it’s certainly something the instructor provided us with.

I watched the documentary and almost immediately connected it to a lot of the theory I’d been exposed to in my course. I hadn’t intended on writing a paper about it, but when the instructor asked us to engage in a critical analysis of some of the ideas we had been exposed to in the course, I thought this was a great opportunity to really hone in on one or two ideas and intertwine them with some of those presented in the film, namely the ones that resonated with me the most. The organizing strategy used by All of Us and the way it was so clearly presented through the film’s narrative was extremely helpful, and it really allowed me to place myself both in the work of the activists in the film and the academic discourse I had been attempting to tackle on a more personal level over the course of the semester. The localized narrative of the film made a lot of the material I had been exposed to in an academic setting much more accessible and relatable.

- Salem Tsegaye

Quote

“All of Us NC moved me deeply and gave me an instructive tool to help social justice activists understand that progress comes in many legitimate forms. Watch it to learn how to squeeze the best results out of attack and loss.”
– Rinku Sen, Executive Director of the Applied Research Center and Publisher of Colorlines.com

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Contact

Sowjanya Kudva
sowj (at) sowjfilms (dot) com

I am a queer, South Asian filmmaker who believes that well-made, self-representative media is key to building powerful queer communities.

I would love to hear from you! Please feel free to contact me at sowj (at) sowjfilms (dot) com if you have questions, comments, or you want to bring this film to your community.